Though they may be best known for their TV work with shows like Community and Arrested Development, you'd never guess from seeing Captain America: The Winter Soldier that Joe & Anthony Russo were anything but cinematic through and through. It's too early for me to give specific thoughts on the movie...and yet they had no compunction whatsoever about discussing things in some detail that other directors might be more coy about.

So be warned...there be potential spoilers ahead.

Luke Y. Thompson: When I first saw the image of Captain America in costume, initially, I was like, "Damn. There's no red." But now that I've seen it, it's like, maybe it's because he's not really fighting for the red, white, and blue in the beginning.

Anthony & Joe Russo: Yeah.

Joe Russo: That is the concept. You don't want to blow the movie for people, and I remember when it first came online and everybody was complaining about it. You know, there's a metaphorical arc to the use of this costume in this film. In the beginning of the movie, he's working as a special operative for a covert organization, so he's wearing a functional uniform that gives him the ability to attack a ship at night, and move around fairly - without a target on his chest. He doesn't function as a symbol of the country at that point. He's functioning as a covert operative.

Anthony Russo: Mm-hmm.

JR: Later in the film, he realizes how important it is that he puts the symbol back on and re-embraces the symbolism of the outfit. And so, hopefully people will be - as you were...

AR: Understanding how the uniform was being used - as a narrative tie. Yeah.

LYT: In terms of costumes, Marvel is often quite faithful to them, but you, in the script, were landed with two of the more ridiculous ones, in Batroc the Leaper and the Falcon.

JR: Yeah.

LYT: Was there ever a point at which you tried to make the originals work in any way, or did you just say, "No"?

[Both]: No.

JR: As a comic book fan, I've been collecting since I was 10, and I'm a big Marvel guy. I mean, I collected a lot of Marvel comics, and I always hated the Falcon's outfit when I was a kid. I thought it was ridiculously dated. I didn't like his back story either. I thought it was very stereotypical.

AR: Yeah.

JR: And Batroc's outfit is absurd. But we found elements of it that we could pull into the sort of grounded universe that we were trying to build, for this thriller that we were making. Batroc basically is a mercenary or terrorist in the film, so we were able to take some of the purple from the outfit, and find a way to make the outfit still look functional without being ridiculous.

LYT: From sort of the get-go on this, '70s political thriller has been kind of the buzz phrase. Was that you're idea from the get-go, or was that something sort of...?

JR: I think it was Kevin [Feige] and Marvel's idea.

AR: It pre-existed us.

JR: It pre-existed our involvement in the movie, but it's the reason we loved the idea of the film. It's a double-whammy: comic book collectors, so we're comic book nuts, so somebody is offering us a comic book movie, and we grew up watching '70s thrillers. That's how we got interested in film. Our father was a big - he loved genre movies, and we used to watch the late show with him every night. Black Friday, French Connection, All the President's Men, 3 Days of the Condor - we grew up on those films. So when they said that they wanted to use that as an influence, we said, "Look, if that's-we were born to direct this movie."

LYT: Was the casting of Robert Redford presumably a direct nod to that?

JR: It was. It was very-you know, this movie, we've joked that you could call this movie 3 Days of Captain America, because it owes a huge debt, creatively, to 3 Days of the Condor, structurally. And to get Redford to us was just, for us - one, not just as a brilliant actor and brilliant screen presence, but two, philosophically, there was a continuity between the last time we had great political thrillers and our movie.

LYT: Of course, you've never had a '70s political thriller that was in 3-D - were you trying for the look of a thriller as well as the tone? If so, how does 3-D affect that?

JR: We were.

AR: It does affect that, interestingly. We went for a verite camera style, which is hand-held, makes you feel like you're there. There's an imperfection to the framing, in its relationship to the action. That sort of like...

JR: Look-we shot the movie in 2-D. For us it's about the cinema of the movie, how the movie's going to live. It will live in 2-D on your DVD and then the Apple Television, or wherever it exists. It does complicate-the hand-held does complicate 3-D, because it can make you-it can make it a little jumpy.

AR: We worried a lot in terms of how we would size of the 3-D.

JR: We worked real hard to massage that. The third act, though, is exquisite in 3-D.

AR: Yeah.

JR: It's got this - it's more of an adventure film, and you're dealing with these big-scale - the shots are a little more premeditated and fluid.

LYT: I'm sure with the third act, you had this conversation - I don't think I'm spoiling anything, because we've seen an aircraft crash in one of the trailers - did you have a conversation about aircraft crashing into buildings? Is that something people will still consider escapist? Because I was surprised at how well it didn't bother me.

AR: Yeah. Absolutely.

JR: We had that conversation, at least a thousand times, because it's something that we're very sensitive to, as film makers...

AR: And as people!

JR: Well, yeah-about representing something that is not, like you said, escapist or in any way disrespectful. You don't want to take people out of the movie.

LYT: Yeah.

JR: There's a grounding element to the film, which is important, but it ultimately is a super hero movie, and if you smack them in the face...

AR: With that...

JR: ...with, you know, images that remind them of a horrific point in our history, you're pulling them out of the movie.

AR: We liked the idea of physically destroying SHIELD, though...

JR: Which is a metaphor...

AR:...yeah. And we thought that, as long-we just had a mandate to everybody, which we discussed, which was like, "Stay away from being evocative of 9-11 in any way." Yes, we were wrecking a building, but we don't - where you're on a textural level, you make choices that aren't in that world, you know.

LYT: I was having a discussion with one of my fellow journalists , and he was like, "Well, the right wing is going to go nuts over this." And I was like, "No, the left wing is going to go nuts over this." The right wing is going to say it's Obama, and the left wing is going to say it's Bush. How careful were you to balance how people could take it either way?

JR: What I think is so funny about that is that we had that same conversation while we were making the movie. And really, the world did that for us. We didn't have to balance it. We had a Democrat in office who has a kill list, who uses drone technology to do preemptive strikes, where innocent bystanders are being killed, while we're also taking out terrorists, or suspected terrorists, I should say, which is just a legacy of what people often identify as a Republican point-of-view. So now it's no longer germane to either party - it belongs to both parties. So yes, I think any pundit could use the message of this movie to service either side of the line.

This might get a bit spoilerish, but I read a few days ago that Sebastian Stan has a nine picture deal with Marvel, Chris Evans has six. I really really dig the implications of that, and I hope they follow through with what I think they're leaning towards.

I like the idea of it being patterned after a 70s political thriller. They were playing 3 Days of the Condor on cable last summer and it led me to pick up the book. So I like that angle to it.

It seems a bit of a letdown to see the hover aircraft crash after so much time and plot was spent on preventing that exact same thing in the Avengers movie. See all the effort you put into preventing that disaster last time? Well, splat! THIS time it crashed. It's a bit second Death Starry to me.

This should be interesting. If the events in this movie nuke SHEILD, I'm really wondering what the TV show is going to do for a year or so until the next Avengers movie comes out? I'm also wondering if any of the TV show cast will show up in any of the movies?

I didn't realize the costume was controversial (it's actually a pretty spot on reproduction of the one he wore in the comics for a while, while he was Director of S.H.I.E.L.D.). I just kinda figured that since Marvel had been big on the covert for years now, that was probably what the deal was. I was okay with it right off, but happier when I spotted the regular duds in the last big trailer.